What is knowledge representation?

Humans are best at understanding, reasoning, and interpreting knowledge. Human knows
things, which is knowledge and as per their knowledge they perform various actions in the
real world. But how machines do all these things comes under knowledge representation
and reasoning. Hence, we can describe Knowledge representation as following:

o Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR, KRR) is the part of Artificial

intelligence which concerned with AI agents thinking and how thinking contributes to
intelligent behaviour of agents.
o It is responsible for representing information about the real world so that a computer
can understand and can utilize this knowledge to solve the complex real-world
problems such as diagnosis a medical condition or communicating with humans in
natural language.
o It is also a way which describes how we can represent knowledge in artificial
intelligence. Knowledge representation is not just storing data into some database, but
it also enables an intelligent machine to learn from that knowledge and experiences so
that it can behave intelligently like a human.

The different kinds of knowledge that need to be represented in AI include:

 Objects
 Events
 Performance
 Facts
 Meta-Knowledge
 Knowledge-base
Types of knowledge

 Declarative Knowledge – It includes concepts, facts, and objects and expressed in a

declarative sentence.

 Structural Knowledge – It is a basic problem-solving knowledge that describes the

relationship between concepts and objects.

 Procedural Knowledge – This is responsible for knowing how to do something and

includes rules, strategies, procedures, etc.

 Meta Knowledge – Meta Knowledge defines knowledge about other types of

Knowledge.

 Heuristic Knowledge – This represents some expert knowledge in the field or

subject.

The relation between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge of real worlds plays a vital role in intelligence and same for creating artificial
intelligence. Knowledge plays an important role in demonstrating intelligent behaviour in AI
agents. An agent is only able to accurately act on some input when he has some knowledge or
experience about that input.

Let's suppose if you met some person who is speaking in a language which you don't know,
then how you will be able to act on that. The same thing applies to the intelligent behaviour
of the agents.
As we can see in below diagram, there is one decision maker which act by sensing the
environment and using knowledge. But if the knowledge part will not present then, it cannot
display intelligent behaviour.

AI knowledge cycle:
An Artificial intelligence system has the following components for displaying intelligent
behaviour:

o Perception
o Learning
o Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
o Planning
o Execution
The above diagram is showing how an AI system can interact with the real world and what
components help it to show intelligence. AI system has Perception component by which it
retrieves information from its environment. It can be visual, audio or another form of sensory
input. The learning component is responsible for learning from data captured by Perception
comportment. In the complete cycle, the main components are knowledge representation and
Reasoning. These two components are involved in showing the intelligence in machine-like
humans. These two components are independent with each other but also coupled together.
The planning and execution depend on analysis of Knowledge representation and reasoning.

Approaches to knowledge representation:

There are mainly four approaches to knowledge representation, which are given below:

1. Simple relational knowledge:

o It is the simplest way of storing facts which uses the relational method, and each fact
about a set of the object is set out systematically in columns.
o This approach of knowledge representation is famous in database systems where the
relationship between different entities is represented.
o This approach has little opportunity for inference.
2. Inheritable knowledge:
o In the inheritable knowledge approach, all data must be stored into a hierarchy of
classes.
o All classes should be arranged in a generalized form or a hierarchal manner.
o In this approach, we apply inheritance property.
o Elements inherit values from other members of a class.
o This approach contains inheritable knowledge which shows a relation between
instance and class, and it is called instance relation.
o Every individual frame can represent the collection of attributes and its value.
o In this approach, objects and values are represented in Boxed nodes.
o We use Arrows which point from objects to their values.
o Example:

3. Inferential knowledge:
o Inferential knowledge approach represents knowledge in the form of formal logics.
o This approach can be used to derive more facts.
o It guaranteed correctness.
o Example: Let's suppose there are two statements:
 1. Marcus is a man

2. All men are mortal

Then it can represent as;

man(Marcus)
∀x = man (x) ----------> mortal (x)s

4. Procedural knowledge:
o Procedural knowledge approach uses small programs and codes which describes how
to do specific things, and how to proceed.
o In this approach, one important rule is used which is If-Then rule.
o In this knowledge, we can use various coding languages such as LISP
language and Prolog language.
o We can easily represent heuristic or domain-specific knowledge using this approach.
o But it is not necessary that we can represent all cases in this approach.

Representation Requirements
A good knowledge representation system must have properties such as:

 Representational Accuracy: It should represent all kinds of required knowledge.

 Inferential Adequacy: It should be able to manipulate the representational structures

to produce new knowledge corresponding to the existing structure.

 Inferential Efficiency: The ability to direct the inferential knowledge mechanism into
the most productive directions by storing appropriate guides.

 Acquisitional efficiency: The ability to acquire new knowledge easily using

automatic methods.